I honestly and truly think that most the problems people attribute to themes and settings are not problems with the setting. They're just problems with headwiz's that have no idea what the hell they're doing. Or in many cases know exactly what they're doing but what they're doing is running a bad game.

Now personally if I was running it I'd take the approach of treating it like the actual navy where everyone is doing something to help, the command staff are all NPC's and we focus on the enlisted personnel and maybe the low ranking officers of the ship. Sure they're doing their own thing up the chain but events would be catered to the rank and file crew members first and foremost with what the command is doing being more a background thing.

For that matter, who actually thinks that Ensign Blueshirt down in Stellar Cartography is ever going to have anything interesting to do on a routine basis?

I'd have a blast with this concept. I wouldn't expect interesting things to come from on high. But each new planet would be reason to go out and establish larger base array (ship to planetary locations) for parallex measurements to known stars and objects to increase those stellar charts and to slip in PrPs. I'm sure this guy got out lots in ToS just off camera.

@lotherio On a similar note I tend to play Janitors on Star Trek Mush's and you would be floored with how many opportunities for roleplay a 'maintenance technician' gets on a star ship. I know I know on a Navy ship everyone is technically a janitor because you're supposed to work together to keep the ship clean as she can possibly be, but there is a canon example of a space janitor in Wrath of Kahn, so they existed at the very least up till TOS era.

For that matter, who actually thinks that Ensign Blueshirt down in Stellar Cartography is ever going to have anything interesting to do on a routine basis?

I'd have a blast with this concept.

More power to you, but I daresay you're in an extreme minority there. I can't see most MU players enjoying a scene sitting around a console talking about star measurements. Now occasionally you could work the cartography in as a plot hook of course... "We need to go (here) for mapping.... oh no, the shuttle has crashed!" or stuff like that. But as day-to-day meat and potatoes MU RP? I can't see it. There's a reason why every main character on every Trek series has been in one of the more "active" departments.

Hmm? I don't follow. O'Brien was a bit-player on TNG because who wants to write stories about the transporter operator on a regular basis? To make him viable as a main character on DS9 they basically had to put him in engineering, which is one of the "main" departments on Trek.

You can make anybody the focus of a story once in a blue moon, but most MU players want more to do than that.

@faraday Oh I was more just making a joke,. Yeah of course you don't focus the show on people in unappealing positions. Only time that works is Red Dwarf, and that was only for one episode before the entire crew died.

Yeah, that was the kind of dissonance I always noticed about Star Trek, especially since it always focuses on Enterprise.
The Enterprise is the flagship of whatever fleet it's in, which means it's regarded as the best with the best crew. It largely focuses on the bridge crew; which means you're largely focusing on the best of the best.
Within Starfleet itself, it's mentioned a few times as to how stringent the Academy requirements are <especially during the Wesley Crusher arc there in TNG>; and what's more, how easy it is to wash out. So just being in Starfleet means you're among the best.
So, in short terms, you're taking the best candidates from the best applicants possible, then from that taking the most experienced and most exemplary officers and making the show about them.
In that kind of situation, even the Janitor is probably a warp theorist/molecular xenobiologist/pastry chef.

You can have a single ship and still make it interesting. You could also do a single space station - I'm surprised nobody's done a DS9 game honestly, as I think that's the Trek setting most conducive to being a MUSH setting (and similar in vein to Babylon 5, which was a successful MU way back when).

Again if I wasn't already entangled in two projects? I'd totally make a station based Star Trek Game, but I'd likely wind up setting it in TOS which might drive a lot of people away. Then again? Might be fun to set it like right before TNG.